Compilations of post-punk, D.I.Y., early new wave, concept rock, avant-garde noodlings (with a beat), bizarre hardcore, obscure demos / early tracks by famous bands, anachronistic glam, and other lost causes far from the norm or weirdly beautiful that came in the wake of the first punk explosion in Los Angeles. A large percentage of this music is not available commercially or through web streaming services. If you are an artist who wants your tracks removed, please let me know.

I've had a few backchannel exchanges with a music publisher and photographer about the ethical nature of this project. I'm really just trying to create interest in this period of music, and with luck some of the bands might find renewed interest and income through more conventional, commercial channels. If you are an artist whose tracks appear here and would like it removed, please write to me and I'll remove it immediately.

This set starts with a true rarity from the Marina Swingers, who have since reformed and are distributing new tracks on their MySpace page. Another rarity, from a band that also only ever released a single, is from the proto-grunge Opus, about whom nobody seems to know anything except that they had an exception cover design for their single. The Rotters, pretty much a "punk" band with (I think) fake English accents, show up with a single that was banned from KROQ for understandable reasons.

There's some relatively lo-fi New Wave here in the form of Grey Obscurity, Newsbreak, Wog, Nocturnal Education, and Information as well as some more polished work by Slow Children (who had a few hits in their day) and League of Nations, and a haunting track by Autumnfair, yet another offshoot of Savage Republic, and from whom a CD comp of their work (no LP was released) is commercially available.

Friday, May 25, 2012

Cookie Bonanza over at Ruminations of the Ephemeral has kindly designed three covers for the three volumes of L.A. Post-Punk I've posted so far. If you are as obsessed as Cookie with the album covers in your iPod, just select all the tracks in your iTunes, choose Get Info and drop these images, respectively, into the artwork box. This is such a nice gift to get on a Friday afternoon... love that Su Tissue takes center stage on the first one.

So this collection has been getting quite a few hits lately, thanks to an appearance on BoingBoing and a lot of tweeting and shouting. Thanks to everyone who has forwarded the link and downloaded the tunes. Various band members have been appreciative in comments an in emails as well — it’s been great fun hearing from them.

Like the past collections, this one has a few oddities. On a whim, I decided to include a track from Neil Young’s “electronic” album Trans, a sweet one written, purportedly, for his autistic son who apparently responded more directly to the vocoder voice than to an unmodified human one. Also a little strange will be the two tracks by Peter Ivers, the first from one of his solo efforts and the latter the ditty he wrote for David Lynch's first feature Eraserhead. Ivers was, of course, the host of LA’s New Wave Theatre on which many post-punk bands appeared. He was murdered in his apartment in 1983 in a still unsolved case. One occasionally hears about a Peter Ivers’ cult revival, and I must say I find much of Terminal Love, from which this track is taken, pretty great.

The track from Aurora Pushups might sound anachronistic — some of the members of this band played in Zolar X — but I find it really catchy. The B-side, “Victims of Terrorism,” was included on Jon Savage’s Black Hole Califironian Punk 1977-1980, and they are if anything more out of place there than here.

There’s also a cameo by ex-Dead Boys singer Stiv Bators, who moved to LA in an effort to become a punk-pop singer. Well, it’s part of the history! Seemingly out of place will be Phranc, the self-described "All-American Jewish Lesbian Folksinger,” but I thought to include her due to her previous membership in Nervous Gender (included in the first volume) and because I saw her open for The Smiths at Jones Beach back in the day.

This new set starts with a track well out of my date range from the great band Steaming Coils, but I though starting with some carnival sounds would give some symmetry to the collection, pointing back to the Wild Kingdom track from the first group. We then move into The Plugz, one of the great first-generation punk bands of LA, from their mellower second album Better Luck. A Mexican-American band, the Plugz incorporated a variety of musical styles into their work, one of the rare LA bands that seemed to want to do that, Tito Larriva being an excellent and ambitious songwriter whose since moved on to score a few films.

Geza X is something of an LA legend, perhaps best known as a producer, though his early band The Deadbeats recorded some classic tracks (one included here), and he himself was a pretty compelling, if very strange, performer with his band The Mommymen. Rikk Agnew is another legend of sorts, being a member of Adolescents and recording with the first incarnation of Christian Death. These two tracks are taken from his first solo album, All By Myself, on which he played all the instruments. These might seem out of place in a "post-punk" collection being largely rock music -- the second, slower track could have been a b-side from an early Kinks single -- but in fact I think this LP is a bit uncategorizable and somehow bridges punk with something more melodic, even a bit grandiose.